Communication systems typically employ control channels to transmit information such as resource allocation assignment messages and other signaling messages. Modern cellular systems currently under development support a wide variety of options and modes, and utilize advanced physical layer and MAC layer techniques. For instance, in the IEEE 802.16e standard, there are multiple frame sizes, coding schemes, or optional antenna modes. The resource allocation can use a frequency-diversity or a frequency-selective assignment policy. While all these techniques have the potential of significantly improving the system performance of communication systems, they also require a lot of additional signaling. Because of this additional signaling, the amount of resources allocated to the control channel needs to be significantly higher than for existing systems.
An imprudent control channel design can bring the amount of overhead needed for the control information to unreasonably large values. In some cases, increasing the control channel size to support an option might offset all the gains (in terms of spectral efficiency) of that particular option, or could even reduce spectral efficiency. Therefore there is a need for a method and apparatus for control channel transmission and reception that efficiently controls channels and offers the necessary flexibility to support multiple options while occupying a limited amount of physical resource.